word-search-forward Bindings ... changed?

[Mark S]

Using Emacs 23.2.

The Oreilly book and other documentation online says that we can invoked  
word-search-forward by

  ctl-c <return> ctl-w "search text"

Instead one sees this message briefly:

  "the mark is not set now, so there is no region"

and then a search prompt. But a phrase typed here is not found (i.e.  
ignoring punctuation and line ends) the way it is found if the  
word-search-forward command is given as a command.

Is this a bug, or has the invocation sequence change?

Thanks!
Mark